Sunday, August 16, 2015

It’s Enumeration Day in Britain! Yay! Everyone in Britain aged 15 to 65, both sexes, was supposed to register for war work. Many see this as a prelude to conscription, a trick, basically. Some responded by quickly joining up, thinking they’d be better off as volunteers. Irishmen responded by returning to Ireland, where the registration doesn’t apply. And some men got hastily married, thinking that conscription would grab the single men first (as it indeed would). Sylvia Pankhurst refuses to register.

The government and some newspapers (the ever-hysterical Providence Journal and the New York World) are concerned about German-Embassy-financed propaganda and subsidized newspapers in the US, as well as covert activities including attempts to start strikes in munitions factories. Speaking of which,

There’s a “race riot” in Milwaukee between Austrian and Italian construction workers at the Federal Pressed Steel Company, who were supposed to be building a plant to manufacture munitions for Russia. The Austrians walked off the job when they realized what it was in aid of, Italians made fun of them, and knives were pulled, as was the custom.